David Wojahn
David Wojahn is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 (Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalest for the Pulitzer and winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. His collection World Tree received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and his most recent is For the Scribe (Pittsburgh, 2017). He has produced two books of essays and is a Guggenheim fellow, as well as winner of NEA Grants, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize and the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship. Wojahn teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Reading List
August Imaginings: On the Poetry of Reality
We weren’t worthy or sure enough of ourselves to catch hold of the subjects beyond our reach –Julia Hartwig, “Meditation (On Czeslaw Milosz)” My favorite literary feud came to its moment of crisis in 1979, in an interview …
Briefe Historie of the Noose in the Colonie of Virginia
I. Gabriel Prosser, Hanged in Richmond for Inciting Slave Rebellion, 1800 Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms Against our Torturer…. Paradise Lost –Book II The smithy, arms akimbo at his forge. The sweat Beads glisten; long scars zigzag his ebon …
Written on the Due Date of a Child Never Born
Echinacea, bee balm, aster. Trumpet vine I watch your mother bend to prune, water sluicing silver from the hose – another morning you will never see. Summer solstice: dragonflies flare the unpetaled rose. 6 a.m. & already she’s breaking down, …
Excursions to the Town Dump: Poets and Their Notebooks
Late in Queen Victoria’s century, a young Jesuit seminarian set the following entry down in his notebook: “April 27, 1871….Mesmerized a duck with chalk lines drawn from her beak sometimes level and sometimes forward on a black table. They explain …